Build the right Product – Using a continuous deployment model helps to ensure you develop the right product by ensuring you get rapid feedback from your business partners and stakeholders.

Earlier Benefits – Continuous delivery enables you get benefit out to your business/customers earlier so they can take advantage of features sooner rather than later in a big bang deployment.

Ability to React Quickly and Respond to Change – If youhave a continuous delivery system set up and are used to deploying continuously you can respond to changes in requirements more quickly or fix and deploy bugs sooner.

Innovation – The continuous delivery process enables you to work closer with the business. This closer working relationship means you have different kinds of people and skillsets working closer together. This can lead to different perspectives on problems which can lead to innovation.

Reliability and Stability – If you release your projects continuously you are repeatedly exercising your deployment process. This continual deployment and the fact you can react to change quicker leads to more reliability and stability.

More Efficient / Save Time –By automating your deployment process you can make your development team more efficient as they don’t have to deal with deployment issues as often leaving them more time to work on the good stuff, writing code!!!

Strategic Impact – A combination of all of the above gives you a strategic advantage over competitors as you can release more features sooner and fix problems sooner.

I can’t stress the benefits of getting continuous delivery working. If you are working on a new project and don’t have to deal with legacy code/systems then this is easier to achieve. If you have to deal with a huge knotted legacy estate like my developers have had to do, then getting a good continuous delivery pipeline running is harder, but can be achieved in stages.

This is what we did. We got automated builds going, and then had installers being built at the end of the builds. Then we worked on the tools for deploying to different environments. We have continuous delivery working into test environments but our next stage is to get this working for production deployments.

This is made harder for us as being part of an American Financial institution we are subject to the Sarbanes Oxley regulations which mean we have to have clear separation of concerns between development and production system, but we are looking to tackle this.

Continuous Delivery by Jez Humble and David Farley

There is a very good book about this subject that I highly recommend reading. The book is called Continuous Delivery by Jez Humble and David Farley. Currently with the team I work in we are using TFS and its built in tools to manage our continuous delivery process with an auto deployment tool written by some of the guys on my team, but we are considering moving to just using TFS as a source repository and using Team City + Octopus Deploy to manage builds, packaging and deployment.

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